Pychogeography Will Self , Ian Sinclair and Kevin Jackson

March 2008)Psychogeography: Will Self and Iain Sinclair in conversation with Kevin Jackson

Transcription: Karian Schuitema (University of Westminster)

Edited with introduction: Steven Barfield (University of Westminster)

The following is a verbatim transcription of the recording of an event hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, on Friday 8th February 2008. This event was co-organised and sponsored by the School of Social Science, Humanities and Languages of the University of Westminster. The University and the V&A share a historic relationship, insofar as Prince Albert was also a patron of the University when it was the Royal Polytechnic Institution (its name was changed in 1841 to reflect this) and both Westminster and the V&A were set up with similar aims during the nineteenth-century to enhance public education in the capital. Literary London is grateful to both institutions for allowing us to use the recording that was made of this event, and to the participants, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Kevin Jackson for generously giving us permission to transcribe their conversation within this issue of the journal, as well as to the articulate, if anonymous, audience members whose thoughtful questions are also evident here.

That Iain Sinclair and Will Self are two of the most important contemporary writers of London largely goes without saying and in this conversation they focus on the practice of psychogeography both in terms of what it means for them in terms of their own work and on its significance as a broader literary and cultural phenomenon. The transcription has been very lightly edited, with some useful references added for the reader and it deliberately maintains the unprepared, raw and improvisational nature of the conversation that occurred during the evening, as Self, Sinclair and Jackson think and reflect aloud in what becomes something of a struggle for the articulation of these ideas and whose trace still remains in the coldness of print.

Introductions

Jo Banham (Victoria and Albert Museum): It is great to see so many of you here this evening and a tribute, I’m sure, to our speakers. I’m going to say very little by way of introduction partly because our chair Kevin Jackson, who is an author, broadcaster and critic and who has written a definitive biography of Humphrey Jennings, will be introducing them more fully. I’d like to contextualise this talk in a sense in two ways. Firstly, that the museum has long been interested in associative properties, in particular the literary ones of images and places and we have a project on the website that looks into this more closely, so there is a connection in many ways between the talk this evening and with the work that is going on in the V & A. Second, I would also to thank the University of Westminster who very generously supported the event and in particular Alan Morrison who is director of the London studies programme there and has been instrumental in helping us set it up. And enjoy the talk. Thank you Kevin.

Kevin Jackson: Thanks very much Jo. It’s more than an unusual pleasure to be here with an old friend and a more recent friend. Iain Sinclair and Will Self are very, very different writers as I’m sure everyone here knows but they are united in a few things, one is a joint admiration for the writings of a senior British writer J. G. Ballard, who they both admire and both know. And in Ballard’s most recent book, his autobiographical work Miracles of Life, he returns their admiration by saying that they are the two writers who he can think of in Britain at the moment who are doing substantial work to extend the range and intellectual possibilities of the artistic resonances of fiction.

A handsome compliment from one of the people from who is well worth receiving a compliment. Of course, one of the other things that unites them is the word that is being flagged up for this evening, which is the word psychogeography, and although that word has been knocking around a lot in some very strange circles, I think it is reasonable to say the it is a lot of its currency in the last 10 or 11 years has been due to the success of Iain’s book Lights Out for the Territory, his extraordinary commercial breakthrough from being a well-respected writer, but shall we say a coterie interest, into something more like the mainstream, and introducing ideas which themselves have been somewhat peripheral to that conventional culture, to a more general audience.

Will of course needs again no further explanation except that he has recently himself has been branching out very differently into the field of psychogeography, and I think one of the things that will be interesting to come out in the course of the evening will be the way in which their individual ‘takes’ on this idea or this practice, whatever one wishes to call it, have fed into their work; the ways which they diverge and the ways in which perhaps they can, despite their divergences, find common ground. I know the idea is that gentlemen, each of you will read a short passage from one of your recent works. Who would care to take the first … the first move … Will?

Discussion

Iain Sinclair: I haven’t heard this idea…

Will Self: Yes, I’ll happily read something. I think since Kevin’s mentioned Jim Ballard, I’ll try and find a passage that relates to Ballard. Which may take me a little while…?

Kevin Jackson: Well, while we are hunting, will you perhaps…

Iain Sinclair: Well OK…I’m not going to do what you say because I’m temperamentally awkward. I have been rummaging around, of late, doing a book about Hackney. I’ve lived there for forty odd years. It’s like a long sentence. I don’t feel I am going to be released from it. But part of the research has been to delve into the past to try and find strange versions of younger selves, that are alien to me now, but which fed into what become psychogeography. And the whole thing with psychogeography was that I remember it as being viewed from a distance. It was around in the ’60s with the Situationists, and I bought a little Situationist booklet in French which I could barely understand but which, you know, was very hip to have. I probably opened it as often as I opened Mao’s Red Book.

Kevin Jackson: (laughs) To the best of my knowledge it was coined by Guy Debord wasn’t it, in about 1953, or thereabouts…

Iain Sinclair: Yes and the interesting thing is that it tracks much deeper back into the ’50s and even into the ’40s as many things do. I was telling you earlier about the figure of Orson Welles, the great American director, who pitched up in Hackney in the 1950s to make a play, he was rehearsing a play about Moby Dick — which, incidentally, was J. G. Ballard’s favourite novel. [Orson Welles, Moby Dick – Rehearsed (1955) –ed.] Welles came out of the theatre and found these old ladies who were living in an alms house, the Spurstowe alms houses, and he decided that he would shoot a documentary piece. So he shoots this interview with these old woman — of course the alms house is now gone, the only record of it is this fragmented film by Orson Wells. He put the film together as a series of little essays or home movies which were shot in Paris, Spain and London. [Orson Welles, Around the World with Orson Welles (1955) originally made for BBC television. –ed.]

So it was 1955, and he goes into a Paris bookshop and here are those psychogeographers and Lettrists [Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the 1940s by Isidore Isou, inspired by dada and surrealism –ed. ] and they are reciting incantatory poems, and it is just extraordinary that the date is ’55 — and from Welles moves into a nightclub where the American actor Eddie Constantine, who later emerges in Godard’s Alphaville, is sitting with a hat on, looking sinister and grinning and then there is Jean-Paul Sartre. So there’s a weird cultural stew that appropriates this term psychogeography, which is a way of thinking and dealing with how the city emerges. It didn’t mean a lot to me then, and looking back I find, in documentaries that I was involved with at that time, the term used with more frequency was psychopolitics. I’m not sure what it meant, but people like R. D. Lang and Ginsberg and Paul Goodman and Gregory Bateson were all using this term constantly …

Kevin Jackson: All the people who were at the ‘dialectics of liberation’ conference at the Roundhouse in 60…7… [‘The Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation Conference’, The Roundhouse, Camden Town, London, 1967. Edited by David Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation (Penguin, 1967)- ed.][1]

Iain Sinclair: Yes, a big term was ‘psychopolitics’, which was a way of heating up politics, and taking it away from corporate entities, and I think the same sort of thing happened with geography. What happens is geography becomes interesting. So … maybe I should let Will do his piece now that you’ve found it, and then I will pick up on this and read a little piece of my own which might relate to this subject.

Will Self: Yes, I say that … (laughs) … no, no, I think I can probably find something to read. This is really a preamble to a walk I took from my house in Stockwell to Manhattan in November of 2006. Now, obviously I didn’t walk the whole way because the Atlantic tiresomely intervenes. I walked to Heathrow Airport, flew to J. F. K., and then walked from J. F. K. into Manhattan.

Will Self: Reading from Psychogeographies (Bloomsbury, 2007)

Iain Sinclair: (Applause) … What I liked very much about the opening riff of your book, Will, was the way that you summoned up presences like Ballard in a pass, as you come through Chelsea Harbour, and also the contact with your friend Nick Papadimitriou, who is a self-described ‘deep topographer’, and the way that you stay within your individual pods of consciousness through all the burdens that you carry along the way. You are together, but apart, and you move into a landscape that you generously award to Nick, through the intensity of his earlier researches. And behind everything else, there is a quest for a quest. I keep getting an enormously strong sense of a debate or argument over parentage, not only your biological parentage, which is a major concern, always, but also the connection to landscape as a kind of alternative parentage, dues paid, so that it makes a very heady mix … in a sense your mother is still lurking in airport corridors …

Will Self: Yes, but in the same outbreak of generosity of spirit I have to say that just, you know, sort of reading that piece with you here Iain, and thinking about your work, and what you say about Nick Papadimitriou, who is actually here this evening. Really that practice, and I think if psychogeography is anything it’s a practice, it’s not really a field; I mean it is something that you go across. I think we owe it to you and particularly that thing which you have in your books exactly as you’ve described of the companions.

Iain Sinclair: Well Kevin was a … (laughs) … classic sufferer.

Will Self: (laughs) … Yes, Kevin, of course.

Iain Sinclair: Well, I mean the thing with Kevin was that initially he was going to write a piece of journalistic reportage — which is always a dangerous prospect and …

Kevin Jackson: It blew up in my face …

Iain Sinclair: and got sucked into … the piece couldn’t just be predatory on this specific occasion, it was taken away by the overwhelming reality of the day and the road and the heat … it had to become part of the thing itself. I met up with Kevin very early that morning, in Shepherds Bush, and we landed beside the river in Staines. We were in this classic greasy-spoon café besides the station, in which these geezers appeared and they couldn’t believe the library that Kevin was carrying with him. For some strange reason he felt obliged to carry a rucksack completely piled up with reference books that he was using to research his article. Brave but foolish … a great sign of spirit but …

Kevin Jackson: A stupidity …

stuck the photographs in and made a book. One of the other guys who was doing it with me was just gob-smacked, I mean not at the quality of it, but just the quantity that I was able to produce, the narratives and information from a single walk. Because the one who was most defeated by the conceptual notion was a very urban black writer who had come out from Brixton and got on the train and ended up in Rochester. He got out of the train and wrote about four lines because … he didn’t know how to approach this, it was so bizarre and so English and so unreadable. And he said all he could do … he went up and down and finally found a barbershop where there was another black guy and they sat down and had a chat and he thought, thank God, there is one civilised person here. And he got back on the train and went home …

Will Self: That makes a perfectly good book as well …

Iain Sinclair: It was perfectly good, and it would have saved a lot of paper (laughs).

Kevin Jackson: I think we have got time for two more questions. So, the next one coming up … OK gentleman here, please, microphone coming in.

(Q.4) Audience member: Hi, you cited Debord, Clare, and so on, which strikes me that it is to do with subverting the monumental and traversing the kind of city. There is another tradition of psychogeography, that of people like Jane Jacobs [The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961 – ed.] and Kevin Lynch [The Image of the City , 1960 -ed.], that is the visual survey, the repetitious crisscrossing of community, and the recursive pattern of behaviour across time. Do you think there is a kind of possibility of that kind of writing as opposed to the linear, and the subverting the kind of peculiarly post-modern romantic writing that seems to have been described tonight?

Kevin Jackson: I don’t know how competent I am to condense that into a single phrase, but I think it points to the suggestion that there are alternative traditions of psychogeography based more on repetition rather than a linear narrative, which would have been expressed more in visual terms than in prose terms and the question is: is there any possibility of reconciliation between the linear kinds of narratives which you have perhaps produced and something perhaps that is more closer to a kind of art practice?

Iain Sinclair: Yeah, obviously, examples of it turn up regularly on my doorstep. And it is a thriving tradition but it is outside … we are talking really rather mainstream here. I think like everything else in the culture there is a kind of Xerox effect, the difficult stuff, the sticky toffee of the universe, is buried so deep, and so long ago (laughs), and from it, generation by generation, the message is smoothed out, made familiar and accessible. Stewart Home takes this thing, psychogeography, and it is in an underground subversive state that is only to be encountered in self-delivered newspapers: and then it creeps out into the mainstream. And so you go on to a point where we are actually sitting here having discussions in the V&A, that’s the endgame of this idea, the whole psychogeographic conceit. And I think with the other tradition that’s mentioned there, much less so. I think it thrives within certain kinds of academic institutions, certain art practices. A lot of people are doing it, there are lots of projects to do with recording, retrieving, making maps conceptually, going out along the M11 doing whatever you do, and archiving and curating a kind of history in a way that is very interesting, I think, but doesn’t fit within popular methods of publication and dissemination.

Kevin Jackson: Will?

Will Self: Well I mean people don’t want to read things that don’t have narrative structure because they don’t pull them along. I mean it is as simple as that. I mean I don’t …

Iain Sinclair: No, I know, I ‘m often being told … told from the start that I can’t do narratives, so … a walk is …

Will Self: I wasn’t talking about you!…

Iain Sinclair: No, I know! (laughs). I am saying that this is where you can get … it is feasible to be published without a narrative, just, but it will be held as a criticism.

Will Self: I think … well, I don’t know … I mean …

Iain Sinclair: But a walk is a narrative that was what I discovered.

Will Self: Yeah, I mean I don’t think that this … I don’t know … Surely the aim is to make something that involves people in some way or another … or not (laughs) … or in fact not (laughs) …

Iain Sinclair: Probably not …

Will Self: You know, or maybe the paradigm is to produce something and put it in a box of whalebone. I don’t know. I mean it is sort of … its not … I am familiar what you are talking about Phil but it’s not something that I find particular interesting myself. (laughs) I am afraid to say. I mean maybe I am missing that kind of … I mean it seems to me that it is the formalisation of the kind of relationship with the environment that everybody should have. And it is a bit like kind of, Iain’s Hackney council teaching people to walk, it seems to me. But I mean maybe it is necessary … It doesn’t seem to me particularly subversive, particularly if it is going on in University departments, unless it is just subverting other peoples funding (laughs).

Kevin Jackson: Time for one last … Ah, now I’m torn morally … All right, you’ve been very patient in the front row … OK … Loud voice.

(Q.5) Audience member: I just wondered, you know, we are talking about of psychogeography going in waves as well as Thatcherism here, and it strikes me that CCTV really started to come in, as psychogeography really started to come back. It was almost like an escape from the state, as we are all being observed, we are all trying to find our own narratives. In one way it serves me when I think about it, it is about finding my own narrative, my own connections to the landscape. Maybe that is the way we are living at the moment, whether it is a sort of escape into the virtual, or the escape from being seen, it has led us to a sense of people needing to find walking as a way of developing narratives of the city.

Kevin Jackson: To reformulate the question: could any cause effect relationship between the rise of CCT(V) and the practices we’ve talking about tonight?

Iain Sinclair: Yeah, I think probably profoundly so. I think they have had a major effect. The kind of slow realisation that you are in this movie all the time, you start to behave like you are in a movie and one of the really interesting things, again locally, I have discovered is that in Hackney we have more CCTV cameras than any other borough. We’ve also imported a system that logs number plates on cars, brought in from Northern Ireland, when the Secret Services did not need it anymore and sold it to Hackney (laughs). You’ve got this bunker with 60 monitor screens watching every street the whole time and they hire people from National Car Parks to do it because they have a high boredom threshold and also they can be sacked without any problems. And what it has done is to create a phenomenal level of paranoia, you know you are on camera all the time, that doesn’t actually bother you anymore but you are very, very, very paranoid if anyone picks up an ordinary camera and there is a flash: you are likely to get your head blown off, it really is serious. And so if you got that projected over a whole city, then, as you are saying, there is the necessity of creating ways of moving through a city that acknowledge that you are now part of the movie. And this will involve elements that could be called psychogeographic. The real Big Bang is the argument between the Virtual and the Actual in zones like the new Olympic Park. Occasionally, you are allowed to take a tour around it, but you are never, never allowed to take a single photograph because that would introduce reality. The thing is that the only images allowed are computer generated, so you have a virtual version that is pushed out time and time again until you believe it; as with the Millennium Dome which became a complete Arcadian pastoral fantasy of blue rivers and orchards, everything that didn’t actually exit anywhere and would be contradicted by ordinary digital photography or by drawings: so you suppress that, and you have that other thing. That’s my thought.

Will Self: Yeah, I mean I think the … the most interesting when street lighting came to the cities in the late nineteenth century the perception was that instead of people feeling that they were safer the perception was that the demimonde would kind of thrive. It was going to grow with kind of hideous mushroom alacrity so it was seen as the kind of spread of sin, the spread of light. I mean in the same way … it’s interesting how this very, very high level of visibility seems to walk in step with a kind of massively increased paranoia about crime and a kind of general unruliness about the way people are. And when I think back to when I was a child in London and the pea-soupers were still going into the sixties despite the clean air act, and you would walk back from the tube station by the hedge, I mean there was no…there were still many days in the winter when there was no visibility whatsoever, and I mean the CCTV would have been completely useless, so there’s some strange … I suppose I’m driving at here, I’m kind of echoing Iain, there’s something about the kind of … the way in which things are potentially over imagined through the lens of the camera, that makes people, I think, want to just fuck off all together really (laughs) … I mean it is … when I was listening to Iain I was thinking I never actually think about it much myself, I’m not highly conscious of CCTV when I’m walking around. I sort of think it doesn’t apply to me because I’m not really doing anything wrong (laughs)…

Iain Sinclair: Perhaps you don’t show up (laughs) …

Will Self: Perhaps I don’t show up, maybe I’m invisible, I don’t know…

Kevin Jackson: Like Count Dracula….Thank you very much. I’m very sorry, that there really isn’t time for any more, but I hope you will join me in thanking very much Iain and Will for a wonderful talk, and I’m told that their works are on sale outside, so we’ll keep the organs of publishing that way…Iain and Will, thank you very much indeed!

[2] De Quincey, ‘Some of these rambles led me to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen.’ De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, available online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/q/quincey/thomas/opium/chapter3.html, date accessed 28th April 2008. [^]